“Do you like Mary Beth?” I asked suddenly. One of Ryan’s pillows sat next to me, and I pulled it to my stomach.

Ryan rocked back from me, his hands lifting from my face to hover somewhere in the air around my shoulders. “Where did that— No. I mean, I like her, but not . . .”

“Right,” I said, twisting my hands in my skirt. It wasn’t that I didn’t believe Ryan. He wasn’t a bad liar like David, he just . . . didn’t. Ever, as far as I could tell. But there was something kind of unsure in his voice, something that lodged under my skin.

“Do you like David?” Ryan asked, dropping his hands to his thighs.

“No,” I said immediately. “We’re maybe not as hostile as we used to be, and he’s finally backed off on the paper thing, but that’s it as far as we go.”

But I kept thinking of sitting across from David at Miss Annemarie’s, the way he’d said Mary Beth wasn’t me. And the more I thought about it, the more confused I felt, which sucked since I’d come to Ryan’s specifically to stop feeling so confused. To feel normal.

Yes, David and I were closer now than we had been. But that was only because he was the only person other than Saylor who knew the whole truth. Of course I’d feel the odd warm fuzzy for him. So there was an obvious solution here.

“Hey, you wanna help me with something?” I asked Ryan, rising to my feet.

He quirked one auburn brow. “Is it the buttons on that dress? Because if so, then yes, very much so.”

It was flirty and jokey and I should find it charming and not slightly irritating. I reminded myself of that as I smiled back. “Not exactly. It’s research.”

The corners of Ryan’s mouth turned down and he flopped back on his bed. “Now that sounds like a great, sexy time right there,” he told the ceiling.

“It’s going to be fun,” I insisted, sweeping a pile of Sports Illustrated magazines off his desk chair and turning on his computer. “It features death and destruction and other things boys like. It’ll be like Hard Fists, only more . . . historical.”

Ryan was still lying on his bed, arms folded behind his head. He laughed. “Oh, man, Hard Fists. I hate that you missed it. There was this one part where this dude killed another dude using, shit you not, a ladle, and Mary Beth said—”

He broke off, and I pretended to be really involved in finding the perfect search engine. “So what kind of death and destruction research?” he said, finally.